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The very cool "My Chili Recipe: An Ars Poetica" includes an actual chili recipe as well as advice that's excellent for chili and poetry: stir occasionally. A good poem requires a kind of mixing or churning, a change (or changes) in direction, in tone or feeling, if it's to offer anything new or worthwhile, and imagination is always the source of the stir. What I find so pleasurable about Tom C. Hunley's poems is the multifaceted nature of his imagination, whether conceptual, ethical, sonic, emotional, or imagistic. I had faith in this book from the first few pages, both that the poems would have something to offer, something to say, and that I wouldn't be able to predict what that was. That's the way it is with the best cooks-they deliver the goods, but you don't know how.
-Bob Hicok, Water Look Away
About the author
Tom C. Hunley is the author of Adjusting to the Lights (Rattle Chapbook Prize, 2020), What Feels Like Love: New and Selected Poems (C&R Press, 2021), and the short film You're Not Alone, from Forerunner TV. He has published in such literary journals as Atlanta Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, and Zone 3. His work has also been featured on Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Billy Collins' The Poetry Broadcast. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University, where he has taught since 2003.
